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User: alvinrod

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  1. Completely backwards. It’s citizens who should be able to monitor their governments. A private citizen might be able to do a fair bit of evil (see the Oklahoma City bombing) but nowhere near what a government is capable of doing (see the Soviet gulags) even when it thinks it has good intentions (just about anything Mao did) and the support of the people.

  2. Re:Doesn't have to be that bad on Minister in Charge of Japan's Cybersecurity Says He Has Never Used a Computer (nytimes.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don’t know the exact nature of his job, but if he’s just there to manage it’s probably not a big deal, but even if you’re wise enough to delegate to experts, what do you do when the experts disagree or don’t have good answer themselves. Maybe in that case it doesn’t matter as being clueless doesn’t leave you that much worse off, but it does make it harder for others to follow or implement if they’re not confident in it.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s just a paper pusher. If that’s the case it probably is better that he just smiles nicely and doesn’t screw things up for everyone working under him. Sure you could argue that it would be better still if a competent person were in his position, but if this position just exists for someone to make appearances and deliver speeches, you’re just wasting the competent person’s time.

  3. Re:Interesting but where does the money come from on Indiegogo 'Guaranteed Shipping' Will Ensure Refunds If Campaigns Fail (engadget.com) · · Score: 1

    That seemingly punishes good actors more than bad actors though. The outright scammers don't give a damn when their campaign inevitably fails, since there was no intent to deliver anyways. Meanwhile, anyone legitimately trying to make something (whether they can or not is another matter) now really needs to raise even more to cover the insurance for everything that fails.

    I'd rather just take the risk that I get nothing if something doesn't work out, rather than have the cost to sponsor projects that I like balloon to cover other fools being parted from their money. Ideally people would learn after getting burned a few times and bad projects or outright scams would stop getting funded. Constantly bailing them out doesn't teach them anything and just means they're even more willing to chase bad ideas since there's no real consequence. It's like bailing out Wall Street. What do you think they really learned from that? It wasn't financial responsibility, it was that if you're declared "too big to fail" that you can do whatever the hell you want since the taxpayer will get stuck footing the bill.

  4. Re:Really? on Mark Zuckerberg 'Not Able' To Attend International Disinformation Hearing (cnet.com) · · Score: 1, Interesting

    That's a fair assessment, but no one forced anyone to sign up for a Facebook or Twitter account. It might sound well and good to ban them or something like that, but then I'd have to ask why you're not doing the same about other "hindrances to society" which might even include a few things that one or both of us enjoy. As much as you might wish to, you can't really legislate good decision making.

  5. Re:So no punishment then on Comcast Forced To Refund $700,000 To Customers Over Misleading Fees (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    Normally I’d say something about damage to their brand but this is Comcast we’re talking about here.

  6. Re:How much do you want to stay in the neighborhoo on New Yorkers Protest Amazon HQ2: 'We Should Be Investing in Housing ... Not in Helicopters' (geekwire.com) · · Score: 2

    That still wouldn’t work because they’ll continue to insist on rent control. No developer wants to put up an expensive new apartment building if it means that they can’t charge market rates. That’s usually why all new development in cities by private investors is for luxury condos. Those are typically immune from any rent control ordinances.

  7. Re:Workers opposing unethical projects is bullying on 'Jeff Bezos is Wrong, Tech Workers Are Not Bullies' (ft.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It isn't bullying, but acting victimized has become the go to tactic of the day to gain attention or sympathy, so it's hardly surprising to see corporations utilizing this tactic. Once you've established that you're the victim in the scenario, it apparently grants carte blanche to be as much of a dick yourself as you care to be. Anyone who disagrees can be accused of victim blaming, being on the side of the bullies, or whatever other nonsense someone wants to spew.

    The behavior is hardly new, but I think Twitter and other social media platforms handed it such a megaphone that no one is quite sure how to react.

  8. Re: unlike music? on Food Taste 'Not Protected By Copyright,' EU Court Rules (bbc.com) · · Score: 4, Funny

    That sounds like an unlicensed derivative work!

  9. Contamination on Tantalizing But Preliminary Evidence of a 'Brain Microbiome' (sciencemag.org) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The work is preliminary, and its authors are careful to note that their tissue samples, collected from cadavers, could have been contaminated.

    This seems like the type of thing they should try to verify before running around and shouting about possibilities. If it's true that this brain microbiome exists in humans, it's probably just as true of rats, or at least other primates. Get some live samples there before getting too excited.

  10. Re:Fake accounts for gathering fairy dust on Twitter is Struggling To Contain the Bitcoin Scam Outbreak (usatoday.com) · · Score: 2

    Is this even hacking so much as social engineering? It sounds like the only step in here that might have involved hacking was getting access to an account with verified status, but my guess is that they used some form of social engineering to do that as well. Just target people with bogus emails claiming to be Twitter and eventually someone will enter their credentials into the bogus website you've set up or give the information to someone over the phone.

    I wish that the news media would quit getting everyone riled up about hacking, when hacking didn't occur. Social engineering is hardly new. Hell, it features quite prominently in the Bible among other stories that stretch back to antiquity.

  11. Re:$1030 million? on The British Army is Carrying Out a Massive Test of Military Robots and Drones (technologyreview.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    The U.S. has pretty much always used billion, but in England 1,000 million historically was called a milliard. A billion was a million millions (or 1,000 milliards) so I think there's still some hesitance to use the term as it is leaves everyone a bit nonplussed.

  12. Re:False premise for DRM. on Hitman 2's Denuvo DRM Cracked Days Before the Game's Release (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think it's even worse than that. For years, the piracy figures were so blown out of proportion that if you bothered doing the math it wasn't unusual to end up with a dollar amount that rivaled the world's GDP. If you're a CEO or manager, it's pretty easy to blame piracy for failed expectations and shareholders might go along with you on it. Of course at that point, you now need to try to do something about the piracy that you've told everyone is destroying your business, so you buy some useless DRM, but what the hell do you care since it acts as a good cover and when it inevitably fails, you can just point to that failure as another excuse.

    Eventually though, investors will realize this is just a load of shit. Just make good games and you'll get showered with money. There was just a story here about Rockstar having the largest weekend haul with their new game. Or look at companies like CD Projekt Red that are selling their games on GoG without DRM and they've grown from a small studio to a massively successful one and their newest game has a massive amount of hype behind it. Their games are easier to pirate than any other since it has no DRM on it, yet they've made massive amounts of money as well.

  13. It's not quite that simple. Both companies do all of their packaging (final assembly) in Asia, so no one gets bragging rights on that part and everyone's CPUs read "Made in China" or "Made in Malaysia".

    You would need to look at where the chip is diffused. I believe that the current AMD Zen chips are being produced at Global Foundaries Fab 8 which is located in New York. The next batch are being done at TSMC, so you would have a point there.

    I believe that the design teams for both CPUs are largely in the U.S. as well, but both AMD and Intel have some smaller teams throughout the world.

  14. I've started to wonder how useful search engines are anymore since it seems like I invariably end up in the same place 95% of the time. What I probably want most of the time for general knowledge is the Wikipedia article, if it's programming related it's likely to be on Stack Overflow, and for video content I may as well just go straight to YouTube (technically Google anyways, but that's a different argument), and there are a small number of other websites that I frequently end up on after searching for something. It's probably easier to just go to those directly in most cases, but to be fair some of them have awful search (or an utterly fucked site layout with shit navigation) for their own sites so it's just easier to use Google to get to where I want within the site. May as well just buy stuff on Amazon, since the extra hour I might spend searching around to save $.50 just isn't worth my time.

    If I'm in a new city and I want to know where to go to eat, it's probably better to just ask a local. Online reviews aren't always that great, and I've eaten at plenty of great little hole in the wall joints that only have one or two reviews total. I think the locals have learned not to review the really good places to keep the tourists away from them. Same goes for other services, where I trust word of mouth or the opinion of someone I know over online reviews.

    I still use web search, but I often find myself using queries pretty much designed to give me the Wikipedia page I want instead of just going to Wikipedia to start with. If all web search went down for a week, I might be slightly inconvenienced, but I don't think that my life would be much worse off.

  15. Never mind all of the other cases where a company held on to some tangential division that slowly suffocated and never achieved greatness because the parent organization had no idea how to utilize it effectively. Sometimes it's better for companies to divest themselves (or spin-off) parts of the company that don't fit well with the core mission of the company.

  16. It's a weird comment. Kotick is the CEO of Activision Blizzard (previously just Activision prior to the merger), and EA is infamous for buying beloved studios only to shutter them a few years later, but the two companies have nothing to do with each other. Kotick is kind of a dick, but I don't think he's only the same level of malicious incompetence the EA occupies.

  17. Re:Only The Stable Ones Are Still Around on How Nature Defies Math in Keeping Ecosystems Stable (quantamagazine.org) · · Score: 2

    I'm not sure if that's necessarily a good take. Every ecosystem is always in flux over time. Even if humanity weren't here, things would constantly be changing and the planet has undergone massive ecological upheaval multiple times throughout history. Ecosystems constantly get destabilized and the creatures that live in them adapt. The population might be heavily culled, but whatever is left is going to have better suited offspring.

    The reality is that DNA that's crap at surviving doesn't stick around to be passed on to future generations. If predators start to move into an area where previously there weren't any, eventually all of the prey animals will adapt to their presence or go extinct and be supplanted by prey animals that do a better job of not getting eaten.

    The models are probably incomplete and missing a lot of data, which is why they tend to go to hell before long. Something in the model gets caught in a feedback loop and dominates the model, but that behavior doesn't occur in nature for some reason. However, the areas where the model breaks should tell you exactly where there's something that either isn't well understood or isn't being taken into consideration.

  18. Re:Finally on Xbox One To Gain Mouse and Keyboard Support Next Week (polygon.com) · · Score: 1

    It's still not going to be equal footing. Even when they come out, consoles aren't terribly powerful so a PC gamer is going to have an advantage just because their frame rate is better. Trying to aim in an FPS that's running like a slide show is almost worse than having to do with a controller.

    I understand the convenience factor of consoles for a lot of people, but if you're going to primarily game with a keyboard/mouse, you may as well just build a PC at that point.

  19. Re:I'm seriously pondering traveling as freight on Why Bigger Planes Mean Cramped Quarters (popsci.com) · · Score: 1

    I suppose you could piss in your pants, which also solves the second problem.

  20. Re:What happened to competition and free market? on Why Bigger Planes Mean Cramped Quarters (popsci.com) · · Score: 1

    When you're buying tickets, you can spend more for additional leg room. It's just that most people aren't willing to pay those prices. I've even been on flights where they were offering to upgrade people to first class for $50 (which compared to the original sticker price is a pretty big markdown) and no one took it. Most people just want to get to where they're going for as little cost as possible, and it wasn't worth ~$18/hour to be that much more comfortable.

    Airlines that didn't adapt and lower prices (what most customers really want) quickly found themselves losing business to those that would offer those lower prices. The free market doesn't guarantee that any product you want will be offered at some price that you find agreeable. You can't expect someone else to cater to your whims and desires if it's no profitable for them to do so, any more than they can make such demands of you. Everyone says that they want more of this, more of that, etc. but when it comes down to it, almost no one is actually willing to pay for it.

  21. Re:Good on The DEA and ICE Are Hiding Surveillance Cameras In Streetlights (qz.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Move to London then. They've got cameras all over. Doesn't seem to have done much about the crime though. Turns out that criminals can just cover their faces.

    I can't for the life of me imagine why people will gladly run to totalitarian solutions with arms wide open just because they think it will solve some other problem. It won't, but now you've just given the government more power and more control, and good luck clawing that back.

  22. It's a good thing the headline pointed out that it was a good thing. I'd never be able to have figured it out for myself if I hadn't been told. Now could someone please tell me what products to consume?

  23. They don't want most of Qualcomm's business, just the wireless baseband technology. Apple already has their own chip design team that does a vastly better job than Qualcomm and they'd have no interest in taking over a business that sells SoCs to third party manufacturers. I would be much less expensive for them to buy up a small company specializing in the part they care about or to just start their own internal team from scratch.

  24. Re:Take care of the homeless on San Francisco Passes a First-of-its-Kind Tax on Big Businesses To Help the Homeless (recode.net) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's what we used to have, but there was a huge moral panic about the deplorable conditions in those facilities and public outcry lead to them being shut down. There's just no getting around the fact that people with severe mental health issues aren't going to behave like well adjusted human beings, but from a pure cost to society perspective, it's probably much cheaper to house them in sanatoriums than it is to run around putting out the small fires that arise when you leave them to wander the streets.

  25. It's probably much better being homeless in California than the upper peninsula in Michigan all also being equal. Also, it's not as though homeless people have the ability to easily travel. The ones that have severe mental problems aren't going to go anywhere, and even the ones who might like to go to California might not be able to easily afford it or might not want to take the risk of leaving a place where they know they can at least eat regularly. Some probably have heard about the conditions in San Francisco's homeless population and want to stay far away from that. If I were homeless, the last thing I'd want is to be surrounded by loads of zombies that just shit in the middle of the sidewalk.

    I think that some years ago the biggest reason for influx of homeless people into California was other states essentially bussing them there. I think that part of California's problem and why the end up spending so much damn money is that they spend as much time fighting against people trying to help as they do trying to tackle the issue in their own ways.